Skeptic views on EMU are usually cast around three arguments. First, the EU does not satisfy 'Optimum Currency Area' (OCA) conditions. Second, heterogeneous economic and financial structures will produce differences in monetary transmission. Third, the shift from domestic to area-wide...

A structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) approach is used to identify the forces driving house prices fluctuations in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden and the UK over the period 1970-1998. Quarterly time series for real house prices, GDP, money, inflation and interest rates are...

Structural models are a powerful tool for business cycle and monetary policy analysis because they are invariant to either policy changes or external shocks. In this paper, we derive a Sidrauski-type model in which both the demand and supply side are structural in the sense that the behavioral...

The durable goods sector is much more interest sensitive than the non-durables sector, and these sectoral differences have important implications for monetary policy. In this paper, we perform VAR analysis of quarterly US data and find that a monetary policy innovation has a peak impact on...

We study the effects on the optimal monetary policy design problem of allowing for deviations from the law of one price in import goods prices. We reach three basic results. First, incomplete pass-through renders the analysis of monetary policy of an open economy fundamentally different from the...

After the switch to a floating exchange rate in 1973, the Swiss National Bank at first adopted annual monetary targets and in the 1990s shifted to a medium-term targeting strategy. In this paper I review the SNB's internal policy analysis, an aspect of Swiss monetary targeting that has received...

In order to explain the joint fluctuations of output, inflation and the labor market, this paper first develops a general equilibrium model that integrates a theory of equilibrium unemployment into a monetary model with nominal price rigidities. Then, it estimates a set of structural parameters...

Was the high inflation of the 1970s mostly due to incomplete information about the structure of the economy (an unavoidable mistake as suggested by Orphanides, 2000)? Or, to weak reaction to expected inflation and/or excessive policy activism that led to indeterminacies (a policy mistake, a...

We build a stylised 12-country model of the euro area and use it to analyse why differences in national inflation and growth rates arise within the European monetary union. We find that inflation persistence is a key potential explanatory factor. Other more frequently mentioned reasons, like...